Mr Benedict Moleta1
1Australian National University, Australia
Biography:
Benedict Moleta is a PhD student in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University, writing on the work of Coral Bell. His master’s thesis (2020, University of Sydney) was on relations between the European Union and Palestine, focussing on the position and prospects of Hamas. Benedict's bachelor's degree was in German and European Studies (2000, University of Western Australia). Political Islam and German politics are ongoing interests, together with language learning and thought and action in the public sphere.
Abstract:
This paper revisits Coral Bell’s 1994 article “Why an Expanded NATO Must Include Russia,” in the context of the current Russia-Ukraine war, and in light of recent expansion of NATO to include Finland (2023) and Sweden (2024).
In her 1994 article Bell argued that, with the Cold War ended, NATO should be radically restructured to become a security community fit for the post-Cold War international environment, and the twenty-first century ahead. In Bell’s view, “Russia is a necessary partner in coping with the consequent turbulence.”
Warnings against a Russia-excluding enlargement of NATO were made by scholars and diplomats in the early post-Cold War years (notably by George F. Kennan in 1997). More recently, Mary Elise Sarotte has written an assiduous reassessment of US-Russia relations during the 1990s, leading to the beginning of NATO enlargement in 1999.
Bell’s article is distinctive in proposing the necessity and the feasibility of engaging Russia in a fundamentally reconceptualized Euro-Atlantic security community. In Bell’s view, this engagement could not realistically take the “waiting room” approach she discerned in the “Partnership for Peace” initiative, which was newly established at the time her article was published. As she remarked; “no one’s temper is much sweetened by being kept too long in a waiting room.”
This paper considers three historically informed premises of Bell’s 1994 argument, which remain instructive for assessing NATO-Russia relations thirty years later: Russia’s signalling of its post-Soviet great power status; ineffective defence cooperation within the European Union; and Russian diplomacy during the Bosnian war.